Anyone here do this? I'm having to reformat my PC due to a whole bunch of spyware and viruses that were accidentally installed. Tried cleaning them out but enough stuff has been screwed up that it's better to just reformat. Plus I've kind of been looking forward to at some point, because I've got a copy of Vista that was given to me by some one who prefers XP. I wouldn't switch to Vista by itself because I play a lot of older games and very set in my ways. But I'm curious to play around with it.

Question: How large of a hard drive partition do I need for Vista? I just want to have Vista by itself with maybe a couple extra GB for installing basic programs to use with it (messenger programs, firefox, etc.). I don't think I'm going to use it much, I just wish to play with it. It'd be my a new toy.

Can't help you on the dual boot questions, but I do have a "minimal" C: partition that I installed Vista Home Premium on and very little else. It has a minimum page file (the main one on another disk) and I moved all of the 'My' stuff elsewhere as well - Pictures, Documents, etc.

The partition is 69.2GB and I have 41.9 free, so 27.3GB in use so far. Hope that helps.

In order to install Windows Vista in a dual-boot configuration along with Windows XP, you need to have either a second partition on your existing hard disk or a second hard disk in your system. To give yourself enough room to experiment, you should have at least 20 GB and preferably 40 GB of space available on either the second partition or on the second hard disk.

I've toyed with the dual booting idea due to some Vista 64-bit incompatibilities with Palm PDA desktop synch software and Rhapsody's music store software.

Honestly, if you're happy with XP, I don't really see any reason to risk messing up your PC to "play around with it." Vista doesn't do anything for games aside from the very spotty DX10 support, and it's certainly not going to make any games run faster (it'll just increase your RAM requirements, if anything). I have no doubt my fairly new system (Quad Core 6700, 4GB RAM) would run games faster in XP, but I just have been hesitant to mess with dual boot OSs or partitioning.

Other than spiffier menus, a Start Menu where it seems actually harder to find programs, and a little gaming folder that all your games' get tossed into, there really isn't much to see in Vista. I've been using it a couple of months, if you have any questions about it, I'm happy to answer.

You might run by a Best Buy or Circuit City and play with Vista a bit there (that's what I did here and there). That's my 2 cents anyway.

XP-wise, it seems kinda neat that it's finding a second life on all these endless Eee PC wannabes (mini-notebook computers), nearly all of which are coming with XP SP3 pre-installed now. So I dunno, maybe at some point Microsoft will market XP as a "mobile OS" due to its relatively modest system requirements.

After learning about the install size, I'm reconsidering. Official requirements are 20gb. That's 15 for the install and 5 for the swap file. Insanity. I mean, I could do it, easily, sure. But, wow. Hah. I think I'll wait until I need it in the future. Perhaps I'll make the partition for it now, but use it for other things, and have it ready for when I wish to install (if a game comes out that requires DX10 or something). Then again, I might have a whole new computer by then. Hmm. Still, appreciate the links. I might still do it.

By the way, I'm about to format and install XP, and maybe I'm weird, but I love a reformat. It's like getting a whole new computer or something. I'm probably just nuts.

Other than spiffier menus, a Start Menu where it seems actually harder to find programs, and a little gaming folder that all your games' get tossed into, there really isn't much to see in Vista. I've been using it a couple of months, if you have any questions about it, I'm happy to answer.

That's exactly what I think of Vista as well. Go figure.

And 15-20GB free for an XP install? WTF? I have XP SP2 happily running on my EeePC, and it only has a 4GB primary drive. XP doesn't seem to care (of course, I haven't tried to put on SP3 yet).

Logged

"All opinions posted are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled."

Other than spiffier menus, a Start Menu where it seems actually harder to find programs, and a little gaming folder that all your games' get tossed into, there really isn't much to see in Vista. I've been using it a couple of months, if you have any questions about it, I'm happy to answer.

That's exactly what I think of Vista as well. Go figure.

And 15-20GB free for an XP install? WTF? I have XP SP2 happily running on my EeePC, and it only has a 4GB primary drive. XP doesn't seem to care (of course, I haven't tried to put on SP3 yet).

Perhaps you misread. Or maybe it was a typo. But that 15-20 was for Vista.

Anyways, I've reformatted. Weee. I feel a bit naked though with such an empty desktop.